baby boom.

• One-horned rhino “demoted” from IUCN list. Weird choice of words — are there any other cases where being demoted is a good thing?
• Check out this very cool animation of the botanical collection of California, in time and space. It almost looks like the lights at night maps, but the pattern of collection isn’t actually correlated with human density. So while you can kind of pick out that necklace of Central Valley cities, SF barely registers. And does Humboldt County have some kind of ban on specimen collection? Are they paranoid about researchers finding the wrong, ahem, plant? [Thanks Brian H!]

• Some captive Black rhinos have been released in an undisclosed location in Kenya.
• Huh? … Oh, there’s a meeting happening right now in Barcelona, the World Conservation Congress. Here’s a statement (pdf) from Dr Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the CBD.
• Ted Turner and some other bigwigs have announced a set of criteria for sustainable tourism (“Global Sustainable Tourism Criteria“) so you can tell the difference between green and greenwashed.
• The mammals, they are dooooooomed. One in four are facing extinction now Red Listed as vulnerable or endangered.
• The UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre has relaunched its database of protected areas. The press release focuses on making all their data available on-line, though it doesn’t touch on whether they’ve actually updated the database or not. There’s a book to go along with it, with pretty pictures (okay, okay, those pictures aren’t in the book. But they’re nice).
• “Indigenous forest dwellers in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, have rejected a proposal to turn 80,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of the land into an oil palm plantation.”